"Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

This has been the single most debated political graph on the web in the last month. Originally appearing on Market Watch and then picked up by Forbes, the graph soon was spread like the angry spores of a liberal biological weapon across the entire internet. According to irrational and easily-fooled liberals, this graph shows that government spending has increased less under Obama than under any previous president going all the way back to Eisenhower.

It would just be too exhausting and boring to go through every single argument that has been made about this graph. So just to give a few examples:

Newbusters also points out that Obama voted for the Bush Stimulus Program when he was a Senator and therefore the entire 2009 budget should be considered Obama’s fault.

A blog at heritage.org makes the same points that the Newsbusters article makes. In fact, many of the actual sentences are identical in both articles. I’m sure this isn’t because one site plagiarized the other, but is simply because great conservative minds think alike. Exactly. Alike.

You also have blogs and other sites pointing out that the graph is misleading because it clearly says that it is showing you the “growth in spending” but some people might believe that it represents “total spending.” Even though there isn’t really any evidence that anyone misunderstood the graph this way, it could be misunderstood that way and is therefore obviously a big fat lie.

All of these are excellent arguments, of course, and are in no way refuted by any of the detailed statistical analyses that can be found on radically biased websites like Politifact.

But since all of this has been written about already, what additional insight could we possibly have to offer?

The one thing that has been missing from this entire discussion is: THE TRUTH.

Namely: what should this graph look like, when all of the lies are corrected and accounted for?

To make sure that we cover every possible conservative argument that has been made, we would have to attribute all of 2009 spending to Obama. We also should really add an extra $200 billion on to the expected spending in 2013 because we know that Obama will not cut any spending and plus he will do other sneaky things.

Thus, Obama’s column should show an increase from $2.98 trillion in 2009 to $3.83 trillion in 2013, which is an increase of 28.5% over 5 years, totally an annual increase of 5.7%.

So we now offer you, exclusively from LiberalBias.com, the correct conservative re-analysis of the data and the unbiased version of the graph.

Isn’t that SHOCKING????

When you give Obama the blame for all of the spending that happened during the entire year of 2009, and also give him all of the blame for all of the spending that might happen after his term is over in 2013, his total spending increase skyrockets to…… 5.7%!

I mean, it’s still a tiny bit weird that it is still lower than Bush’s or Reagan’s…..

But pay no attention to that!

The point is: it’s very, very different from the first graph, which was clearly infected with liberal bias!!!

5 Responses

OK, I’ll bite. If it is the truth that Obama has spent so little, how is it that his deficits have been 3 times Bush’s last year, also his worst. How is it he is spending so little if under his presidency, the debt has grown by 60%?

I’m not being snarky, but this claim just doesn’t pass the smell test. It seems like there is some accounting maneuver that is being employed in order to show a small increase.

What it looks like is happening with this graph is it is assigning Obama’s first year to Bush’s tab, which shows a trillion + deficit, then comparing the rest of his years at over a trillion, but only slightly more than the first year so as to register such a low growth percentage.

This is a dishonest way of looking at the spending of this administration. IMO